Information literacy is the postmodern context for LIS

I've just read Dave Muddiman's article "Towards a postmodern context for information and library education" (Education for Information 17 1999, pp1-19), on the suggestion of my colleague Anne (thanks Anne!).

A thought provoking article, Muddiman ties together a few threads that have been floating around in my head. Noting the decline of the theoretical context for LIS as a service built on notions of the public good, of librarians as collectors of society's knowledge in order to make it available to the public, of libraries as "social memory", Muddiman notes the rise of a technologically focused LIS theory through classification systems to the current emphasis on information /knowledge management as the focus of the discipline. He situates this progression through the historical trends of modernism and postmodernism.

I think Muddiman is right to note the vaguely disembodied state of LIS in postmodern society. Traditional power strucutures are breaking down and with them the consensus on social memory, cultural values and authoritative sources of information. Information and knowledge are up for grabs. Corporate interests value the knowledge management paradigm, it offers solutions to the problem of intellectual capital essentially residing within the heads of human beings.

In my opinion, information literacy is clearly the central theoretical paradigm for LIS in this postmodern context. With no consensus on a body of knowledge, information as commodity, corporate claims to intellectual capital and property as private assets, fragmented culture; information literacy is the natural evolution of the LIS profession. With no consensus on the public good, the individual must be empowered to negotiate and navigate effectively and efficiently through the postmodern information environment in ways that respect his autonomy and allow him to contribute to social capital.

At their best social networks and collaborative collective knowledge projects such as wikipedia might be viewed as attempts by groups of individuals to empower themselves in a global and fragmented information environment. Librarians need to shift their focus towards individual empowerment within an information environment over which they no longer have significant control.